


Small Town

by ifitwasribald



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s), Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 08:05:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1259023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifitwasribald/pseuds/ifitwasribald
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of Extremis and the Mandarin and Killian, a town keeps Tony's secret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Town

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyMerlin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMerlin/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Connected](https://archiveofourown.org/works/866815) by [LadyMerlin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMerlin/pseuds/LadyMerlin). 



Rose Hill, Tennessee is a small town, sure enough.  It’s never pretended to be anything else, or wanted to.

People have a lot to say about small towns.  That they're backwards, boring, frozen in time.  That they're "quaint," if you're pretending to be polite. That the folks who live in them are too dull or too scared or too lazy to get the hell out.

Of course, mostly the people who say that kind of thing are the people who've never set foot in a small town.  That or the people who had reason to get out as fast as their cars could drive, and never look back.

The truth is that small towns are a lot like anyplace else.  People in them think and talk about the usual mess of politics and sex and food and last night's TV.  And sure, neighbors keep track of each other, for good or ill.  Everybody in Rose Hill’s got their own word to say about Mrs. Jackson's too-short skirts and Mr. Becker's drinking habits, and the eldest Ramirez girl, a pretty young thing who just last week went and announced that she's a lesbian, which everyone agrees is a shame—not because Rose Hill's got anything against homosexuals, not for the most part anyway, but because it surely means she's bound for someplace else.  Who's to blame her, though, it's not as if she's likely to meet a lot of young ladies who share her lifestyle around here.

Point is, it's only natural that neighbors think about each other, talk about each other, and seems like mostly they do it in my bar.

Funny, the one thing most folks don't talk about much is all the rest of the country knows about Rose Hill, and all they care about too.  Nobody here had an awful lot to say about the terrorist attack that maybe wasn’t one after all—poor Chad Davis dead and gone, his reputation dragged through the mud, and right in front of his mother, too.  And then the odd business with that woman and her friends, that started a fight in my bar that ended up all over town.  The whole thing too strange to be real, too impossible to talk about.  Anyway, all the news from elsewhere trumped talk of a bar fight, even one that ended up wrecking the diner across the street and a good part of the street itself.

And even talk of that, of the President held hostage and Iron Man coming back from the dead to save him and all, faded away after a time.  But gossip never does stop, and whatever people might think, times always change, even in an sleepy town like this one.

Looking back, the oddness to do with the Keener family started not long after the attacks.  Mariah's boy, Harley, started showing off a little to what friends he had, playing with all manner of fancy new toys that his mother couldn’t possibly afford, not on the kinds of jobs she worked, poor thing.  But none of that merited much discussion beyond a little haphazard speculation, a quick confirmation that the toy shop two towns over, the fancy one that might have sold the kinds of things Harley'd acquired, hadn't had any kind of break in or such.  Not that anybody would suspect Harley of a thing like that anyway.  He was a good kid—a little bit of a smart aleck, maybe, but basically a good kid.

It was a year later when the rumors about the Keeners started to circulate in earnest.  Mr. Campbell from the corner store spotted a strange car parked in their driveway—nicer than anything Mrs. Keener'd ever owned—and Brianna Lewis saw that same car at a stoplight just outside town, and she swore up and down that the man driving it was the spitting image of Tony Stark.  Nobody believed Brianna, not at first, because everybody knew she was the sort to see celebrities coming out of the woodwork all over the place, and there wasn't the first reason anybody famous would ever set foot in Rose Hill.

Except, come to think of it, the stranger who'd been in the middle of the bar fight that Christmas really had looked a little like Stark.  Nobody'd said so at the time, because we all thought Stark was dead, and say what you will about small towns, but Rose Hill's always shown respect for the dead.

But it turned out that Stark wasn't dead after all, and after a time Brianna wasn't the only one who recalled a man fitting his description driving along the main road.

Something like half the town came to the most logical conclusion anybody could come up with, which was that Mariah Keener'd got herself a rich gentleman friend who only happened to look like a famous billionaire-turned-superhero.  But another year on, another too-nice car appeared in front of the Keener house, and for a good long stretch.  And that time Sandra White, an honor roll student with a good head on her shoulders, reported that she personally served Mr. Stark a burger and fries at the drive thru where she worked, and that she was sure it'd been him, by his beard and his eyes, and also that he'd tipped her forty bucks with a wink and a smile before he peeled out onto the road faster than anybody had any call to be driving around there.

It only took another year for the town to reach the general consensus that, yes, Tony Stark really did visit the Keeners from time to time, and the only reason anybody could think why was that he was sweet on Mariah.  

Even that didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, everybody admitted, because while Mariah was surely easy enough on the eyes, and well-liked in town, there wasn’t anything about her so special that the world’s most eligible bachelor would have sought her out, bad breakup with that C.E.O. of his or not.  Besides which, if hardly seemed likely that the girlfriend of the richest man in the country would still be working two jobs at not much over minimum wage.

Then again, Mariah always did have that independent streak about her, and nobody had a better idea of what Tony Stark might be doing in Rose Hill.

Folks asked Mariah about it, of course.  I asked her about it myself, I’ll admit, and sweet as she was, she lied right to my face.  Wasn’t good at it—not at all—but when she swore up and down that she’d never laid eyes on the man, I just gave her a smile and promised that it wasn’t nothin’ but idle curiosity.  I wasn’t about to go telling whatever secrets she had.

I wish I could say everybody in Rose Hill felt the same, but there were a few thought they had secrets worth sharing with folks outside of town.  John at the hardware store got the idea in his head that he could make a pretty penny calling the tabloids and letting them know what was what, but his wife put an end to that idea, and his buddies at the bar too.  And I heard a couple of girls down at the high school actually did email some gossip site online, but nothing came of it, thank heavens.  No reason poor Mariah shouldn’t be able to enjoy whatever good thing she’d found in privacy, not after the struggle she had, what with that good for nothing husband of hers taking off and leaving her in the lurch and all.

Of course, after she passed, rest her soul, nobody thought much about Stark at all—too busy looking after her boy, and her sister, and that niece of hers she used to treat like her own daughter.  But then, three days later, he swept into town, hardly hiding himself at all this time.  He showed up personally to pick up pizzas the first night he was in town.  His name was right there on the check to Sarah Irving, who owned the place the Keeners rented, and that's no rumor—I saw it myself when Sarah stopped by the bar, still a little bit in shock over getting a check from Iron Man himself, and for three years' advance rent too.  Folks said the hospital, which by all accounts did the best they could for Mariah in her last days, got paid personally by Stark as well, along with a memorial donation on top of the bills.

So of course everybody figured it was as good as confirmed that he and Mariah had been an item, and all anybody could think was that it was too bad how short a time they had.  But then Lucy Keener spent a long night in my bar, drinking her sister's favorite brand of whiskey, and not long before closing time admitted to me and everybody else who hadn't headed home that the real reason Stark was in town was Mariah's boy, Harley.  Stark treated him like a son, Lucy told me, and it wasn’t just the money.  She marveled at how much he seemed like a regular guy around the kid—a little nervous, awkward around a teenager he didn't see as often as he wanted, like Harley’s good opinion mattered more than Captain America's.  

The next day she came right back in, begging me and everybody else to keep mum about the whole thing.  Stark wanted to keep it quiet, and it didn't take much to figure why.  The man didn't play safe with himself, that's for sure—he'd been reported dead on the news three times already by then, and everybody remembered what happened to that mansion he had out in Malibu.  What’s worse, to judge by the tabloids he didn't have a soul in the world close to him, unless you count his C.E.O. ex-girlfriend.  So you could see why he'd worry if folks knew that some kid in the middle of nowhere was his own godson, and not just in name.

Funny, you sure wouldn’t expect a billionaire to get so attached to a small town kid—not that Harley wasn’t plenty smart and special in his own way, but a lot of kids are smart, and most of them don’t have superheroes popping out of the woodwork to look after them.  Still, if anybody deserved it, needed it, it probably was Harley.  I know I wasn’t the first to notice that he blossomed in those years, gone from a surly kid too smart for his own good to an honor roll student, maybe not the homecoming king, but well liked.  At first I figured he was just growing up, letting go of that rotten excuse for a father he’d had and moving on on his own.  But thinking back, a lot of the good that got into him probably had something to do with living up to his godfather’s good opinion.

Yeah, Stark was good for Harley, and the money wasn’t the half of it.  And if all he wanted was to be left alone when he came to visit, to have the relationship kept quiet, well, the both of them deserved that much, and I'd say everybody in town agreed.

Outsiders, though... well, we didn’t figure they’d see it it way. And sure enough, it wasn't long after we got poor Mariah laid to rest that a reporter came snooping around. He didn't know what he was talking about, of course—didn't even know what he was looking for.  All he knew was he'd heard that Tony Stark had spent some money in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, and he was hoping the reason why would sell some copies of that rag he called a paper.  

He came by my own bar, asking questions, but all I had to do was play dumb.  He believed it easy enough.  I honestly think he might have figured small town folks aren't smart enough to lie.  Either way, I didn't tell him a thing, and neither did anybody else.

He left, and didn't come back, and I hoped that might have been the end of it, but some lady with a blog or some such thing showed up a couple weeks later.  She had some photo she'd found online, a blurry thing of a car driving down main street with a man just visible inside of it.  She'd figured the man was Stark, and between you and me she wasn't wrong about that.  She tracked down Rose Hill from the signs off in the distance, and wanted to know what it was a man like Stark was doing this far off the beaten path.

She even offered some cash to anybody with any information—not a lot of cash, I guess blogging isn't exactly a gold mine—but still, you gotta figure that that was a temptation to some folks around here. Not enough of one, though, because she didn't get any takers, not even when she got desperate and doubled the amount.

Some of the high school kids kind of made a sport of dealing with her, though, and they kept at it with the next lady who came to down figuring teenagers could be expected to spill what adults were keeping secret. Josie Ramirez had that one half convinced that Stark came through town just to eat at some barbecue joint the next town over, at least until she kept up with the tale, adding that Stark liked to wash it down with the milkshakes at her uncle's ice cream bar, that he adored the pickles up in Oneida, and that, come to think of it, she's pretty sure he thinks eastern Tennessee's pizza rivals New York's own. Somewhere in there, the reporter lady figured Josie was pulling her leg, which is a good thing, because it means there was no danger she'd believe a word of it when Brianna Lewis started claiming that she and Stark were in the middle of a torrid affair, the details of which were obviously straight out of some romance novel or other.

It went on like that. Sleazier sorts of reporters would show up around these parts from time to time. Mostly it happened not long after one of Stark’s visits, when he came by to see how Harley was doing and in the process spent some foolish amount of money, or attracted attention some other way he wouldn't even notice.

It got to be downright entertaining, to tell you the truth. Chuck Hornsby, who works for John over at the hardware store and has a build more or less like Stark's, I guess, grew himself a beard styled after the "Iron Man" look, and had himself a laugh claiming to be the man himself, which irritated a couple of so-called reporters to no end when they finally got a good look at him.

And even straight-laced Sandra White got in on the action one time, giving some reporter directions that sent him driving all over town and ending up at the old quarry that some of the kids in town like to use for the parties and other goings on that they think us adults don't know about. As if we didn't do just the same when we were their age. So that guy probably did get an eyeful, but I don't imagine any of the folks there were the sort whose pictures would sell any papers, so in the end he left us alone.

And, eventually, so did everybody else. Things have quieted on down now that Harley's off at M.I.T., and only comes by Rose Hill to visit his aunt and his cousin now and then when he's on break. I don't imagine he'll move back when he's done—he's headed for all sorts of excitement that he can't find here. And Tony Stark, well, I don’t expect him to come back at all. Harley's his boy, but he's got no reason to love the place Harley's from. No reason a town like ours should mean anything to him at all.

I wonder sometimes if he even realized we knew he was here. Harley did, of course, but I doubt it would have occurred to him to mention it to Stark. Give the man some illusion of privacy, I guess. Hard to feel sorry for a guy like him, but privacy at least he's never had much of, and I suppose everybody deserves at least a little.

Anyway, whatever Stark thinks of Rose Hill or doesn't is just fine by me. Whether he likes it or not—whether he knows it or not—after what he did for Harley, Stark's a part of Rose Hill, just like Mr. Campbell, just like Mariah, just like me. We weren’t looking for his appreciation. We were just looking to do right by one of ours.

Like anybody would, small town or not.


End file.
